Freedom Requires Responsibility (And Other Uncomfortable Truths)

In the never-ending flood of replies to my apparently monstrous position that freedom requires responsibility, and that homeless people shouldn’t shit on sidewalks, a couple of predictable themes keep popping up.

First: believing in personal responsibility means I must lack compassion.

Second: homeless people aren’t the masters of their fate, but helpless victims of circumstance.

Third: I should “hope I never fall on hard times.”

Let me throw an entire duffel bag of bullshit flags on the field right now.

People don’t “fall on hard times.” They quit when times get hard.

You really think I haven’t had lean years? Decades of them? Welcome to the American worker experience. I’ve lived it. But here’s the difference: I didn’t give up. I got up. I showed up. I worked.

And when the paycheck wasn’t enough? I found ways to make more. I used my back, moving things, fixing things. I used my brain, writing, solving problems, doing work others couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

If you’re motivated and willing to work, there is always someone willing to pay you something. Always. You just have to show the fuck up and have a little pride in yourself.

So the idea that I might someday “fall on hard times”?

Fuck. You.

After everything I’ve accomplished in this life, after everything I’ve survived, you think I’m just going to wake up one morning with a fentanyl pipe in my hand and decide, “Nah, I’m done working”?

Let’s be crystal fucking clear: Homeless people are not victims of circumstance. They are the result of personal choices.

For every homeless person you show me, I can show you someone who lost their job, lost their house, got punched in the mouth by life, and still kept putting one foot in front of the other. Someone who righted their own ship. Someone who remained the master of their own soul.

Yes, that’s Invictus. No, I’m not citing it. Fucking whoops.

This brand of liberal thinking, the idea that society is obligated to prop up its least productive members so they can live large while contributing nothing, is killing America.

Want to know where the American Dream went? It didn’t get stolen. It walked out the door the moment we decided people should get paid to sit on their asses and do nothing.

It started when we embraced the welfare state.

And let me clear something else up while we’re here: there is absolutely nothing “progressive” about progressive politics. It’s regressive as hell. Asking people who get up every day and do what needs to be done to hand over the fruits of their labor so others can sit in a city park, get high all day, and shit on sidewalks funded by the same tax dollars?

That’s not compassion. That’s not justice. That’s anti-American.

The fact that “homeless people shitting on sidewalks” is even a debate is a goddamn embarrassment.

Can we please band together and take this country back?

Because responsibility isn’t cruelty. Work isn’t oppression. And freedom without accountability isn’t freedom at all.